On the Britney Spears Beat With a Tabloid Superspy

Jeff Weiss’s Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly is a pop-star biography the way Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a journalistic account of a trip to an auto race and a district attorneys’ convention—i.e., circumstantially, but also not at all. Before the public meltdown, before the conservatorship, before the relitigation of the 2000s in hand-wringing documentaries about our culturewide complicity in the destruction of Britney and other pop stars’ lives by gossip-rag stringers swarming like piranhas with press cards, and before the social-media dance videos shot from impossible non-Euclidean camera angles like TikToks from the Black Lodge, Britney Spears was a huge star and Britney Spears was hounded, and Weiss (who went on to a distinguished career in the reputable-by-comparison field of music journalism) was one of the hounds. As a young writer in Los Angeles—then as now, categorically one of the least-remunerative types of young person to be—Weiss blags his way into a reporting job at a celebrity magazine by claiming to have won the H.L. Mencken Award for Excellence in Journalism at a college which does not actually have a J-school. This lie sets the tone for a headlong plunge into the reality-distortion field that swirls around famous people in the naughty Oughts, in which truth is the first casualty of gossip-mag circulation wars, car chases are all in a night's work, and the clubs part their velvet ropes for Verne Troyer (RIP.)

Written in the voice of a James Ellroy tabloid fixer palpitating on pharmaceutical taurine, it’s a compulsively readable account of a you-had-to-be-there era by someone who was actually there—and on every page our own oneshotted, brainrotted epoch slouches toward the VIP section at Hyde to be born. “People were running red lights at every intersection,” Weiss writes. “Proverbs about virtue and humility felt paleolithic when everyone was trying to get ahead, get paid, and push miracle whips. It was Laguna Beach and The Apprentice and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Home Improvement became Cribs. Shock and awe as a cultural mandate. From every packed club and card, you could hear Usher, Lil Jon and Luda’s ‘Yeah.’ The sky was balling.

"Until you escape it, you rarely understand how much it affects you. I considered myself a cool-headed skeptic, but it’s like living next to a power plant: only a Geiger counter can measure the extent of the radiation. What’s the point of following the rules when the rule book is being shredded in real time? We were entering the famous-for-being-famous era, where the only currency was public recognition. Literary romanticism seemed laughable.”

In this excerpt, Weiss his photographer associate Oliver hop a last-minute flight from L.A. to Vegas to watch Spears & Co. ring in 2004 at the Palms, and our hero cops to just how comfortable he’s become on the other side of a powdery looking-glass: “Secretly,” he writes, “I reveled in the choose-your-own-adventure possibilites of every assignment. I’d begun to subscribe to the classic bad-faith axiom: If I don’t do it, someone worse will.”

It’s hard to forget a flamethrower. Arson machines spurt fire to the beat of Nelly’s “Pimp Juice” as we strut through a gold-mirrored tunnel into Rain. The fog is so thick that I can barely see past the bill of my trucker hat. We emerge into a twenty-five-thousand-square-foot maze of gyrating bodies, dancing water fountains, and pagan hedonism. A Viking rave sponsored by Armani Exchange.

Bottle service girls guide us into a bronze elevator. On the third-floor VIP mezzanine, tables are covered with ice buckets, top-shelf liquor, and mixers. Ours overlooks the elevated stage and dance floor. On platforms suspended in midair, go-go dancers in leather corsets wrap themselves around stripper poles. On an IMAX screen, rain is projected, with a palm tree dotting the “i.”

In her private skybox, Britney Spears sits right next to us. For the last five years, I’ve dreamed of a reunion. But this isn’t how I planned it. I figured we’d meet as peers operating in parallel spheres of creativity. Something like Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. She’d be a huge fan of one of my books. We’d be introduced at the club and settle down into domestic serenity. Two kids named Kaleb and Brayden, a mortgage, a white picket fence, and a phalanx of twenty-four-hour security guards to clothesline anyone who tries to hop the white picket fence.

I didn’t expect such tangled emotions. My adolescent crush has been tainted by celebrity obsession. There she is, dressed down in a baby-doll tee and hip-hugging jeans, but a force field exists between us, between her and everyone. Barely old enough to drink, but worth eight figures, the most glimmering possibility that a glitching system can still produce. It’s not midnight yet, but the future is starting to collect shadows, and this eclipse falls over me while I silently deliberate what it all could mean for my own prospects. If I nail this story, there will be bonuses, enhanced cachet, the rise of my own crossed star. A start.

Above the DJ booth, a “Countdown Until Midnight” clock comes on. I stumble to the railing, looking into Britney’s suite. She’s orbited by lithe backup dancers, a few blondes who look like cousins, a security guard, and a dead-eyed Bluto wrapping a creatine-enriched bicep around her.

Oliver jabs me.

“Take off that hat.”

Security is sparse in the VIP. You pay for what you can get away with. No one blinks when out the Von Dutch comes enough powder to have the club sleepless until the Rose Bowl kickoff. Oliver does key bumps in plain sight. I pop an MDMA capsule of “the purest shit,” allegedly bought off a London rave legend. A few girls in Britney’s booth notice us, but Britney is mesmerized by this beefhead with a Caesar cut.

Courtesy of Farrar, Straus and Giroux

At the stroke of midnight, 2004 is catcalled in by fourteen-foot jets of fire and a cascade of artificial rain. A disco ball shatters. The crowd whoops. The speakers growl; the whistle shrieks. The clubgoers yell in response . . . Aww skeet skeet skeet skeet skeet!

Lil Jon bounces out to scream all the ad-libs for “Get Low.” Too $hort emerges to perform “Shake That Monkey.” Oliver and I pound tequila sunrises and absorb the syncopated chaos. Britney furiously kisses the frat boy with the popped collar. Of all the Patrón joints in all the neon towns of the world, I had to walk into hers.

Britney might not even be the most famous name in the building. In another water box, Kobe Bryant and his wife, Vanessa, survey the realm. In the next, Sacramento Kings superstar Chris Webber rehabilitates a microfracture of the knee with liquid cures. For the first hour, I bob my head as Britney bounces, being adored by both the boy toy and a Salma Hayek doppelgänger.

Refills are summoned with a swirl of the arm. Part-time models stare because we have a table at Rain on NYE. No matter how humble you think you are, it’s easy to slip into a pretense of superiority. Live long enough like a king and you start to lie to yourself that you are one.

Britney and her crew file out of their box. When I stand to follow, the molly wallops me. A series of flashes and levitations. Arteries flooded by Jacuzzi jets. Day-Glo color lighting up edges of my mind. I’m sweating diamonds. Oh my god, are they playing “Stand Up”?

The dance floor is a strobe-lit acre. Ludacris and Shawnna duet—When I move you move—and thousands freak in sleazy harmony. Never before or since has the phrase “feels like a midget is hanging from my necklace” carried such purpose.

“We’re about to have a legendary moment at Club Rain!! ARE . . . YOU . . . READY?!!!” The DJ suddenly shouts. “MISS BRITNEY SPEARS IS IN THE BUILDING! And this is her NEW SINGLE!!!”

Britney’s troop parts the crowd. The DJ flips a switch. A river circling the dance floor turns green, yellow, and red. Flames shoot and smoke leaks from the walls. When the mist clears, four dancers encircle Britney. “Toxic” bangs from the loudspeakers, a comet of erotic Alpha Centauri funk. This is the second single, slated to drop next week, but already destined to ring off in every club until the last days of revelation.

The strings bleed like they were stabbed by a synthesized pickax. Britney’s eyes are flammable. Whipping her blonde mane, she rubs her hands across her flat bare stomach, almost inducing mass fainting. Her hips swivel and vibrate. She caresses her face, laminated eyes rolling back in ecstasy. From the VIP rafters, Kobe and Vanessa gawk. In tune with a song about fatal lust, the dancers weave like furies, bobbing within centimeters of her body, the cold fog becoming a steam bath. “With a taste of a poison paradise . . . I’m addicted to you…”

Britney controls everything, writhing with no worlds left to conquer. For the first time in her adult life, she’s free. Her family is back in Louisiana. The tyrannical managers and agents and publicists and lawyers and accountants and label executives and spying minders are thousands of miles away. The minute-by-minute itineraries, the persistent demands of press, and the teen idol façade feel distant. No one is here to tell her what to do, and all she wants to do is be twenty-two. She’s flagrantly wealthy, having already fulfilled impossible dreams—a life’s work finished early.

I sip tequila dregs, mostly ice. Tropical waves overrun my veins. I blink hard, crystal sweat trickling. Fans mob Britney, asking her to autograph receipts and bar napkins. She seems overwhelmed, but honors the requests until her bodyguard, Big Rob, swoops in.

Amidst the commotion, Oliver whispers to a girl in her entourage. They peel off toward the unisex bathrooms. Taking Britney’s departure as an affront, the DJ spins Justin Timberlake’s “Rock Your Body.”

In the refuge of the VIP, I chain-smoke Parliaments and empty the Patrón bottle. The molly throttles me for a few more swells, but the rush eventually dwindles. Where exactly am I? Three a.m. in Las Vegas, sputtering . . . the go-go dancers swinging from their stripper poles, body paint chipped, makeup smeared, ripped confetti and spilled champagne on the ground. The shock-and-awe explosions still roar at timed intervals to defibrillate anyone slipping away. 2004 is dawning with inflamed and distracted eyes.

Oliver remains at large. Only the early morning scavengers remain among the crowd. I look through the smeared Plexiglas. Britney’s after-party stumbles out, mostly smiles and full cups. Swiveling my head toward the VIP exit, I see her, scarcely able to walk. Knees buckling. The bodyguard and the lummox catch her and clandestinely escort her out before anyone can ask for another autograph.

Excerpted from Waiting For Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly, by Jeff Weiss. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the author.